Convert Bitmaps to Vectors with VectorMagic
For the designer or pre-production person, one of the top-ranking moments of dread has to be when you need a logo for the client’s Web site and print materials and they send you a 150 pixel JPG (or other bitmap/raster image) file. You, of course, need a vector graphic that will scale nicely between icon size and billboard size without pixelating; and they, of course, have nothing of the sort. This is where a vectorization tool comes in.
Unfortunately, most vectorization tools cost too much, are a pain in the keister to use, and don’t really produce usable results without a lot of finagling. I haven’t tried the Corel product in years, but Adobe Illustrator’s Live Trace leaves much to be desired. It tends to round corners in the strangest of places and make up new colors to fill in the pixelization blend areas. Thankfully, we now have another alternative: Stanford University’s VectorMagic.
VectorMagic is a free online application that takes your randy little raster images and converts them into amazingly accurate vector EPS or SVG file. Comparing it to the Adobe and Corel products is unfair, but we’ll do it anyway. Looking at the images side-by-side, VectorMagic does what we’d expect and want a vectorizer to do: take a big-picture view of our messy, aliased (that stair step, building-block appearance) artwork and churn out something appropriate. The other applications seem to be taking a pixel-by-pixel approach which probably accounts for the additional colors and the unusual corners. It looks as though the big boys (Adobe and Corel) have some catching up to do. Kudos to James Diebel and Jacob Norda, the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project developers, for their work.
All that’s required to run it is a modern browser, a Flash player, and an image to vectorize. And, while we’ve been talking about logo conversion, you certainly don’t have to restrict your images to graphics. There are already a couple of photos in their examples that look quite stunning as well. Take it for a spin and let us know how it works for you.
you need a logo for the client’s Web site and print materials and they send you a 150 pixel JPG (or other bitmap/raster image) file.
That rings lots of bells. Thanks for the info on VectorMagic, so far so good.
That happened to me precisely the other week. I had to ring them up and talk to all sorts of secretaries to get hold of an original vector.
Thanks for the heads-up.
This works wonders! Thanks for sharing.
Why is comparing them to Adobe and Corel “unfair”? Because VectorMagic is (thus far) free while you pay large sums of money for other software? Granted, VectorMagic is a one-trick pony whilst the other software mentioned are full-featured graphics applications - but wow, does VectorMagic ever do near-miracles with that one trick! I’ve sampled Adobe’s Live Trace and found it to be relatively inaccurate. I use Corel X3 and while I’ll say that its Trace is enormously improved over what it used to be (and it really is better than Adobe’s offering, as the samples on the VectorMagic site would seem to indicate), the four fairly low-res images I’ve had VectorMagic trace thus far have honestly come out better than Corel’s best effort - and that’s high praise indeed.
I don’t know where Stanford is going with this - whether it will go commercial or open source (from my keyboard to their ears - grin) but they have a winner in this application. Frankly, it’s the best I’ve seen, given my small sample set so far. In the meantime, I’ve bookmarked the site and intend to use it as frequently as opportunity requires.